Browse:

FourSquare API Integration thoughts

We’ve been rummaging through a few REST APIs recently – trying to integrate and match up data from various providers with the aim of improving the overall experience on a website (and accompanying mobile apps) and the quality of search results.

References don’t change with time (they do with the Google Places API)

Caching the data is allowed (for up to ~30 days)

FourSquare appears to have more accurate geo-locational data than our ‘default’ provider (where postcode lookups are probably being used most of the time).

Things which aren’t so good :

We have to manually match premises (as there is no shared identifier available), so we need to try and work with miss-spellings, incomplete information and so on.

Foursquare venues often provide a Reservations URL which resolves to OpenTable/TopTable – but there’s no incentive for us [as developers] to expose that to our end users. There’s also a distinct lack of documentation on the FourSquare site and combined with the fact they appear to have deleted a blog post about the integration we wonder if the reservation links will be soon dropped.

Things which are potentially interesting :

The API appears to allow us to submit updates to it – so it’s tempting to submit post codes and addresses if we’re very sure about the strength of the match (perhaps a combination of close proximity and exact name for example); however we’re not sure what foursquare will think about us if we submit thousands of updates.

As mentioned above, our current dataset has geo-coordinates, but these are often based on the postcode, and therefore not that accurate – especially in rural areas. If we have a good match with foursquare’s data, it’s tempting to use their geo-coordinates instead (from experience we know rural postcodes often have a large catchment area).

The correlation between a premises popularity and hygiene rating is quite strong – so it’s an interesting thought to leave a ‘tip‘ if there is a significant discrepancy (lots of likes/checkins and a poor rating) .

Having said the above, submitting bulk updates is potentially a can of worms.

Share

Search

Customer Quotes

Pale Purple have been a great asset to Anorak. Whenever we need any technical and design work for our websites, David and his team are our first port of call. They have been professional, knowledgable, patient and willing to produce creative and cost-effective solutions to deadline.
Paul SoreneAnorak.co.uk